Number 18 -- A barely-hanging-on Blogoversary

Blogoversary #18

SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

I started this blog while I was still teaching, in 2006. I had just begun my 31st year as an educator.

Just like in previous years, however, I was stressed out and irritated about the standardized testing situation in Indiana. I needed to vent.

I focused the blog on testing. 2006 was in the middle of the “No Child Left Behind” unpleasantness when schools were labeled good if they catered to wealthy, upper-middle, or middle-class students and bad if they were filled with children living in poverty. This is simply because, then as now, test scores mirror a family's economic status. Rich kids, with educated parents and well-staffed and well-supplied schools score high. Poor kids, with parents who work two or three minimum-wage jobs and understaffed and underfunded schools score low. Adding injury to insult, NCLB made punishment of the so-called bad schools part of the plan.

BAD TO WORSE

Things have gone from bad to worse in the last eighteen years. Recently, I’ve complained less on these pages, only because I’ve written less due to personal health problems (only ten posts in 2022, three in 2023, and just five so far this year -- counting this one). Still, I worry about the future of public education...

• Testing is still misused and overused.
• Politicians (mostly Republicans), Indiana's included, still use every excuse to whine about the sad state of our public schools, how awful teachers (and their unions) are, and how our children are being shortchanged.
• There is still a crisis of teacher shortages around the country.
• Children are still being murdered in their schools because the nation is too afraid of the gun lobby to stand up to gun fanatics.
  
• Vouchers and charter schools still drain money from public schools at increasing rates despite the fact that they do no better than public schools.
• Teachers are still undervalued and underpaid.
• Public school libraries are being attacked by right-wing activists who want to censor our nation's history, black and LGBT+ narratives, and other books that most of them haven't read.
  

...because "reasons" -- including...

1) Teaching is a predominantly female career and women don't get the pay or respect men get.

2) We, as a nation, talk a good game but we really just don't give a damn about our children and their future.

3) The nation is in political turmoil trying to recover from COVID and its resulting economic impact. This has led to an increase of right-wing attacks on America's tax-supported institutions...including public education.

MOVING FORWARD

I regularly badger my local representatives about public education, but, being Republicans, they either are too afraid of their leadership to speak out in favor of public schools or, as I suspect is true, don’t really care about public schools. In their mind it’s “socialism” and we can’t have that, now, can we? I sometimes feel like they don't hear me either. My state representative is (or was, I can't recall) a board member for our local Lutheran schools (voucher recipients -- no conflict of interest there!), and my state senator is a doctor who introduced a bill forbidding parents from providing gender-affirming care for their children. So much for "parental rights."

I’m not giving up. I’m hopeful that the young people of the nation take charge, insist that schools are fully funded, and insist that teachers are given the credit and pay they deserve. With luck, our former superintendent of public instruction will become Indiana's new governor and things will start to change for the better. Note that this is a very red state (aka "the Mississippi of the Midwest") so, while I'm hopeful, I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, make sure you register to vote. Here are a couple of good posts to get your blood flowing and motivated to vote for pro-public education candidates...

Fixing Public Schools Again and Again

School reformers have a bad habit. Over the past century, they have skipped from one big policy fix to another without analyzing what happened the first time around. Or even whether the reforms succeeded or failed.

ALEC Has A New Voucher Push

...the current voucher pitch-- we're no longer trying to sell them as refuge for students stuck in "failing" schools, because we now know that the data shows that vouchers aren't better at all. And voucherites have fully adopted the goal of universal vouchers because A) it gets them closer to full privatization and B) rich, well-connected people make way better political allies than poor people.

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Educational Mansplaining

As an American male, I'm an experienced mansplainer. My former teacher colleagues (mostly female) would surely be able to give you an example or two of my tendency to "help them understand" something that they probably understood as well or better than I did. I remember once, at a meeting discussing psychometric testing of a student, I started explaining percentiles to another teacher. With a look of pity and loathing, she said to me, "I understand what percentiles are." What she likely left unsaid was, "I have an education degree, too, you obnoxious, insulting POS!" Out loud she added, "It's ok. I'm used to you."

Now that I have established my mansplaining credentials, I'd like to comment on a thread I read on Twitter this morning. The thread consisted of women giving examples of someone like me mansplaining something that they already knew.

I must admit...while reading the thread I felt the urge to add my own tweet explaining how Twitter threads work...

...but I digress.

A FLASH OF INSIGHT

The thread that I read included a tweet from Dr. Jessica McCarty, whose Miami University (Ohio) bio reads,

Dr. McCarty has a PhD in Geography from University of Maryland at College Park. Expertise in remote sensing, GIS, data mining, natural resources, agricultural & food security, land-use/land-cover change, fire, air quality, GHG emissions, black carbon, climate, app development, and UAVs. She is a PI and/or Co-I on NASA, EPA, NSF, USDA, and UN projects that focus on using remote sensing of food security, fire, emissions, & air quality. She has presented at NASA, AGU, IIASA , WMO & UN meetings.

I have no idea what most of that bio means, so I'll assume that Dr. McCarty is a fully qualified professional. Her tweet about mansplaining...

Dr. Jessica McCarty (‪@jmccarty_geo‬)

At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al.

Looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag. “I’m McCarty et al.”

At that point, I had a blinding flash of insight...

For the last few decades, politicians in the U.S. (mostly male) have been mansplaining education to American teachers (mostly female).

Think of politicians as the "white male post doc" and think of teachers as Dr. McCarty. For years they've been telling us "what's wrong with education" and "how to fix education" but the teachers are the real experts.

MANSPLAINING EDUCATION

Let's see some examples...first, George W. Bush's "signature" education policy, No Child Left Behind.

Were there any teachers, anywhere in the country, who believed that it was possible to have all students score "proficient" on standardized tests within a dozen years?

Of course not. The politicians who wrote NCLB had absolutely no clue what proficient actually means. Nor did they realize that standardized testing was an excellent method of determining a student's family income, but not much else.

And then we had Race to the Top. Not to be outdone, the Democratic designed education plan begun eight years later included evaluating teachers using student test scores. Were there teachers anywhere in the country who didn't understand that those teachers who taught in wealthy schools would get better "evaluations" than teachers who taught in high-poverty schools?

Once again, the answer is no. Politicians didn't notice that "good" teachers (by their definition) seemed to congregate at schools with children from wealthy families while poor kids always seemed to have the "bad" teachers. They didn't understand that correlation is not causation. They didn't understand that there are out-of-school factors that have an impact on a child's school achievement and that test scores do not define quality schools or quality teachers. David Berliner explained this well in Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. American schools are set up to reward students who come from wealthy families.

THE STATUS OF TEACHERS

By now it should be no secret why teachers are "mansplained" about education -- aka treated with less respect than other professionals. Teaching is still seen as "women's work" and those who hold control of the funding in education are mostly men.

In a field so dominated by women, it's not surprising that, in our patriarchal society, teachers are devalued and disrespected. Women still earn less than men. Women still have trouble reaching the highest levels of societal status (outliers notwithstanding). And women are still objectified in popular culture.

Money and status are still the most reliable paths to respect in our culture. The relatively low pay of the teaching profession and the fact that women make up the majority of educators, tends to lower the status of other teaching when compared to other professions.

In societies where education is more successful teachers are paid more and afforded higher status.

Now, the next time you hear a politician talk to a teacher or a group of teachers (or the general public) about "...what's wrong with education in this country" you'll know what's really going on.

And to my former colleagues (mostly female)...Thanks for reading. I really needed to explain this.

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It's not enough!

"OPEN THIS SCHOOL!"

MASKS WORK...

I feel like we're living in an Idiocracy.

Wisconsin's Republican legislature is fighting the mask mandate ordered by the Democratic governor...because, of course they are.

Wisconsin's Legislature repealed Gov. Tony Evers' mask mandate. He issued a new one.

Fearing more deaths statewide, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers reissued a mask mandate Thursday, standing up to a Republican Legislature that had repealed his previous mask order earlier in the day.

"We know that wearing face coverings can save lives and prevent death. We know it's supported by science," Evers, a Democrat, said in a two-minute video.

He said repealing his previous mandate to wear face coverings in public places put at risk about $50 million a month in federal funds to help hundreds of thousands of vulnerable residents.

Experts, i.e. those who are educated and actually know things, understand that masks, along with other mitigation measures, help prevent the spread of COVID-19 (See here, here, and here. The idiocrats in the Wisconsin legislature aren't experts.

...BUT MASKS ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SCHOOLS TO OPEN

So what do experts say about opening schools during a pandemic? Teachers are worried about their own safety, as well as the safety of their students, co-workers, and families. Some teachers are refusing to return to school until they can get vaccinated. In Indiana, the governor has decided to forego vaccinations for teachers even though the CDC recommended that teachers be vaccinated at the same time as other "essential" workers. Our governor is not alone. Others are saying that teachers should just go back to work and quit whining.

So, do teachers need to be vaccinated before schools can open?

If you have seen or read any news recently, you might think that the new director of the CDC believes they don't.

CDC director says schools can safely reopen without vaccinating teachers

Teachers do not need to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before schools can safely reopen, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

“There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing on Covid-19.

“Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools,” she added.

This is the extent of the reporting that most folks see on Facebook, cable news stations, or the headline in the newspaper. The article above even has "Key Points" of the article bulleted at the top which further discourage readers from reading any further...

That's it. Case closed. The science has spoken. Right?

Wrong!

Notice what's left out of the "Key Points." There isn't anything about what needs to be done before schools can open other than teachers have been worried, and they don't need to be vaccinated.

If you keep reading, however, you get to this paragraph...

A study from the CDC published late last month found little evidence of the virus spreading at schools in the U.S. and abroad when precautions were taken, such as wearing masks, social distancing and ventilating rooms.

Did you see that?

...when precautions were taken, such as wearing masks, social distancing and ventilating rooms.

In Indiana, our idiocratic governor, aside from postponing teachers vaccinations, now says that students and staff only need to keep a "social" distance of three feet instead of six. And now that there are more contagious variants of the disease, the governor, in his (lack of) wisdom has decided that schools are...

...no longer required to quarantine if someone is exposed in the classroom, if they kept three feet socially distant and wore a mask.

According to the CDC, social distancing is still six feet. Even if it wasn't, how am I going to fit 25 (or 30 or 35) kids in my classroom and keep them even three feet apart?

PROVIDE AND EMPHASIZE MORE INFORMATION

Since many citizens in our idiocracy (including some legislators and, apparently, our governor) don't necessarily read entire articles, or only get their news in small bites from the TV, more information about what schools need to open must be emphasized! The director of the CDC should emphasize that teachers don't need to get a vaccine before schools open if and only if...

1. all staff members and students have masks
2. strict social distancing (of six feet) is followed and
3. school buildings and classrooms are properly ventilated

If a school can't do those things, and if the state or federal governments can't provide funds to allow them to do those things, then it's not safe for schools to open.

Think about the special education teacher or special education paraprofessional who can't social distance from their high-need students, whose students have trouble keeping masks on, and are working in an old school building with poor ventilation. It's February. Opening windows is not an option in some parts of the country.

Think about the preschool teacher who has a room full of two, three, or four year olds. Can she keep a social distance between them? Can she make sure that they all keep their masks on? How about snack or lunch time? How about diaper changes? What if the classroom is in an old building with poor ventilation?

Not every educational group or age group of students are able to follow the guidelines from the CDC. Not all school buildings are equiped to keep students socially distanced or to provide adequate ventilation.

When someone makes a blanket statement that "it's ok to open school buildings even if teachers aren't vaccinated"...

...it sounds like an idiocracy to me.

You might also like this post by Nancy Flanagan.
The 12 Point Covid-19 DISCONNECT Between Teachers and Those Who Want Schools Open Now!

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2021 Medley #1: Bye, Bye Betsy and other stories

DeVos Resigns, End wasteful testing,

COVID and education, Choice for schools,

Blaming teachers, The "Science of Reading"

BYE, BYE BETSY

Betsy DeVos Resigns

I was ready to publish the rest of the articles in this post on Wednesday, but I got sidetracked by the horrible events in Washington D.C. Since then I have paused, while I figured out what I wanted to say. Then, last night, Betsy DeVos resigned...

I am against nearly everything DeVos has done during her term as Secretary. She has pushed her agenda of privatization and has rejected pleas to support students overwhelmed by debt. She has ignored racist education policies and neglected the students who need the most help. She hates public education and public educators. I doubt that she cares much for public school students, either. She was never qualified for her job. She never attended a public school. She never worked in a public school. She never sent her children to a public school. She's an elitist billionaire who cares only about what she can control with her money.

I'm sure she will now return to private life and continue to wreak havoc on public education by buying legislators and using her billions to support private, religious education.

There are a lot of articles discussing DeVos's resignation -- the nation's worst Secretary of Education appointed by the worst President. Mitchell Robinson verbalizes how I feel about her. After all the terrible things her boss has done over the last four years, she has finally had enough, apparently...

I wish I could find more satisfaction in something I’ve hoped would happen for 4 years.

But as usual, Ms. DeVos did the absolute least she could do (resign), well past the time when it could have made a difference (with 13 days left in her lamest of all duck terms), and is probably only doing it to avoid doing something she doesn’t want to do (invoke the 25th Amendment).

DeVos resigned, allegedly, because her boss’ insurrection attempt was an “inflection point” she simply couldn’t ignore.

TIME FOR TEST WITHDRAWAL

The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful?

If anything good can come out of the devastating pandemic still terrorizing the nation, then it's that there is absolutely no reason to continue our overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Alfie Kohn pens another excellent, thought-provoking piece...

Standardized tests are so poorly constructed that low scores are nothing to be ashamed of — and, just as important, high scores are nothing to be proud of. The fact that an evaluation is numerical and the scoring is done by a computer doesn’t make the result “objective” or scientific. Nor should it privilege those results over a teacher’s first-hand, up-close knowledge of which students are flourishing and which are struggling.

Sadly, though, some educators have indeed come to trust test scores more than their own judgment. One hears about parents who ask a teacher about problems their child is having in school, only to have the teacher reach into a desk and fish out the student’s test results. Somewhere along the way such teachers have come to discount their own impressions of students, formed and reformed through months of observation and interaction. Instead, they defer to the results of a one-shot, high-pressure, machine-scored exam, attributing almost magical properties to the official numbers even when they know those exams are terrible.

SCHOOLS AND COVID-19

COVID and Schools: The Data and Science Then and Now

The conventional wisdom is that it's safe to send kids back to school. The need for students to be in face-to-face school situations is so important that we should not worry about adults in the building and their susceptibility to COVID, but send the kids so they can get an education (Note: this is often said by the same people who lobby for online charter schools!).

It turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Schools are not always the safest place for kids or adults.

...internationally, they have already figured out in the public consciousness that schools are platforms for superspreading. It is very clear that Covid has taken advantage of some of American’s most challenging traits— denial and hubris— in the debate about reopening schools.

So what does the national data reported in early December by US News tell us about the situation with communities, schools, and Covid?

• Their analysis of their national data shows that the high school student case rate (13 per 1,000 students enrolled for in-person classes) is nearly three times that of elementary school students (4.4 per 1,000).
• They observed that the higher the community case rate, the higher the school district case rate...

THE MYTH THAT TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE

Can charter schools pick the best students? No, but many believe the myth.

Jay Matthews, the reformist Washington Post education writer without any educational training, writes this article about how it's not true that charters can pick and choose their students...and then proceeds to tell us how charter schools pick and choose their students.

So it’s wrong to say that charters are allowed to pick whatever students they want. But that’s not to say some of them haven’t skirted those rules.

In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Public Advocates civil rights law firm found that at least 253 of California’s roughly 1,200 charter schools maintained policies that illegally prevented students from enrolling or remaining at their schools.

A school in Hemet, Calif. said that to apply as a sophomore a student “must be earning an ‘A’ or ‘B’ in both Geometry and Biology.” A school in Redlands said “only students who show steady academic progress . . . will be eligible for enrollment.” Within a few months of the report’s publication, more than 100 charter schools contacted the authors to say they were correcting their policies to get off the bad list...

IT'S ALL THE TEACHERS' FAULT

The New York Times Adds One Plus One And Gets Three

When the pandemic hit and schools closed, teachers were lauded for their heroism...changing their entire jobs overnight and taking care of their students online. As the public has tired of the pandemic, however, the inconvenience of not having all schools open -- despite the danger to those who work in education -- has opened teachers up for derision. The very fact of teachers as essential workers has given many the opportunity to blame teachers for inconveniencing their lives.

Peter Greene, in the following two posts, explains some things about education and teaching...

...what the heck do people think teachers do every fall? Seriously. Do they imagine that teachers just assume that all their new students know X, Y and Z because it's in the curriculum. Do folks imagine that teachers spend the weeks before school poring over BS Test results to learn where their students are? Because, no-- mostly the test results aren't available yet and because teachers are forbidden to see the actual question, all they get is the test manufacturer's "analysis" of the results, which is mostly hugely broad and unhelpful.

No, in the fall, teachers use a large array of formal and informal assessments to figure out student's individual weaknesses and strengths. Teachers do this daily, and then they keep doing it all year. This remains one of the great, silly fictions of the BS Test--that the results are useful to teachers who would be lost without them. In reality, the BS Test is like a guy who shows up at the office of a general who is commanding thousands of troops on dozens of fronts and this guy--this guy shows up with a pop gun and announces, "I am here to win this war for you."

Another Round Of Teacher Bashing

The level of bash, of demeaning insult, in this "selfish teachers close our schools" argument is huge. Because there are only a couple of possible explanations for the picture critics like FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] paint:

Teachers are stupid people who don't understand the settled science.

Teachers are stupid and also lazy people who went into teaching hoping they would have to never actually work and the pandemic shut-downs are their idea of a gift from God, and they want to stretch out this paid vacation for as long as possible.

Teachers are big fat liars who are pretending not to understand the settled science so they can milk the taxpayers while providing nothing in return.

Teachers should be martyrs who want to give up their entire lives for their students, and if they don't want to do that (or, incidentally, want to be well-paid for it), they're lousy teachers and terrible human beings.

Note that all of these include the assumption that distance learning is a big fat vacation. Also, people who chose teaching as their life's work don't actually want to teach. Also, as FEE makes explicit, teachers do not have students' interests at heart. They don't care about the kids at all (which adds to the assumption of their stupidity, because if you don't care about children, teaching seems like a pretty dumb career choice, but hey--maybe you became a teacher because you couldn't manage a real job).

A TAKE ON THE "SCIENCE OF READING"

The Critical Story of the “Science of Reading” and Why Its Narrow Plotline Is Putting Our Children and Schools at Risk

Last one for today, an essential article for teachers of reading and literacy.

#1. Hijacking Terminology
Words have power. The term science connotes credibility, but it also represents evolution and diversity. The “science of reading” has stripped away the dynamic interplay of experiences that grow a child into a reader and a writer and centered the literacy process solely atop phonics. This narrow plotline disregards the impact of writing, comprehension, culture, play, mentor texts, family, and the power of a teacher-researcher to individualize instruction...

#2. Reframing the National Reading Panel...

#3. Attacks on Higher Education and the Problems with NCTQ...

#4. “The Sky Is Falling” atop Declining NAEP Scores...

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Who's to Blame?

How can a school system evaluate their teachers this year?

No one has been trained to work under our current conditions of either remote learning or learning while maintaining a social distance while wearing face coverings.

Everyone is doing what they can to make things work.

Some of the teachers who have worked hard to be there for their students have gotten sick.

Some have died.

We've discovered that COVID can strike anyone...even children. Even in school.

Parents who work outside the home can infect their children, and those children can infect their teachers.

When students or teachers get COVID, school systems, cities, and municipalities are quick to say “it didn’t happen at school.” This keeps the schools open and the kids at school so parents can work even if it’s not true. (And I understand the need for parents to work. I understand the difficulty for some parents of not being able to work from home...and at the same time having to be home with their children).

Sometimes if it gets too bad, schools will "go virtual."

What happens to the parents, then? Do they quit their jobs? Do they lose their jobs? Do they enlist the aid of grandparents who might be more susceptible to serious illness?

The adults in schools can get sick and die from this disease. When they do, who do we blame? Who is responsible when teachers (or kids) get sick and die from COVID-19? Do we blame the teachers themselves because "it couldn't have happened in school" so "they must have gotten it from somewhere else?"

Can we stop blaming educators for getting COVID?

Could we please have the decency to admit that, in many of these cases, we have no idea where they got it? While it is possible these educators contracted the virus outside of school, it’s just as likely that they didn’t. We simply don’t know.

What we do know about this virus is that the only way to truly stay safe from it is to avoid crowded public places, perform regular disinfection and ensure proper ventilation and clean air flow when we must share space with others. Those conditions are hard to come by in a public school.

These educators who have lost their lives during the pandemic have been forced to choose between increasing their risk of infection by returning to in-person instruction and not being able to feed their kids or pay their mortgage.

We're all doing what we can.

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U.S. Neglects Tomorrow

In Aesop's tale of the ant and the grasshopper, the busy ant made preparations for the coming winter, while the flighty grasshopper played away the summer. When winter came, the ant was prepared with substantial food for the winter while the grasshopper was starving.

The United States seems determined to play the grasshopper when it comes to our future. We use up our energy without a thought of what will happen when it runs out -- and fossil fuels, no matter what other arguments one might make about them -- are a finite resource. We fill our landfills to bursting...and recycling is failing in its promise. We ignore the changing climate that is drying out the "nation's breadbasket" and burning up California's farmland. And, most important, we don't seem concerned with preparing our future citizens and leaders, our children.

In 1989 Carl Sagan said,

...we have permitted the amount of poverty in children to increase. Before the end of this century, more than half the kids in America may be below the poverty line.

What kind of a future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them? This is stupid.

In the video above, Sagan claims that the US is 19th in the world in Infant Mortality. We haven't improved much -- if at all -- since then. Why? Because we don't spend as much money on our babies as other countries. We're a wealthy country yet we aren't investing in our future by taking care of our most important natural resource -- our children.

Without continued investment in our children, will we be able to maintain our lifestyle and standard of living? In 1996, Sagan wrote,

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United states is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Superstition and darkness -- take a look around.

U.S. ranks near bottom of advanced nations in child wellness — new report

If we don't take care of our children now how will that affect our future? Will we prepare enough doctors? enough teachers? enough people to support the society? Will we have more social unrest? more poverty? more violence? Will our economic gaps increase?

Which will have a greater impact on our daily lives...Jeff Bezos's $200+ billion net worth, or the more than 38 million Americans living in poverty?

The United States ranks near the bottom of dozens of advanced nations in terms of the well-being of its children, according to a report with data from before the coronavirus epidemic.

The rankings were published by the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF, which show that of 38 advanced countries for which data was compiled in a range of wellness markers, the United States was No. 36. (See ranking chart and full report below).

The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway topped the list, which takes into account data on the mental and physical health of children as well as their skills as measured by international exams. Mental well-being includes both life satisfaction as well as suicide rates; physical health includes rates of overweight and obesity as well as child mortality, and skills focuses both on proficiency in reading and mathematics as well as social skills.

But the report noted that in many of the advanced nations on the list, children are not doing well; in fact, in nearly half, more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty. Of 41 nations ranked on child poverty, the United States was fourth from the bottom.

What Does It Mean When Hardly Anybody Stands Up for the Basic Needs of Children and Public Schools?

I do not remember a time when the wellbeing of children has been so totally forgotten by the leaders of the political party in power in the White House and the Congress. This fall, school district leaders have been left on their own as they try to serve and educate children while the COVID-19 pandemic continues raging across the states. School leaders are trying to hold it all together this fall at the same time their state budgets in some places have already been cut.

Teacher pay penalty dips but persists in 2019

In order to prepare our children for their (and our) future, we'll need teachers. Are we investing enough in teachers? Are we providing an incentive for the "best and the brightest" to go into education? Are we addressing the nation-wide teacher shortage?

We have been living through a decline in the number of teachers being trained, even before the pandemic. Colleges and universities report fewer students are choosing education. This past week we learned that the University of South Florida will close down its education school. Will more universities follow USF's lead? Who will train tomorrow's teachers?

Key findings

• The teacher wage penalty has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty is how much less, in percentage terms, public school teachers are paid in weekly wages relative to other college-educated workers (after accounting for factors known to affect earnings such as education, experience, and state residence). The regression-adjusted teaching wage penalty was 6.0% in 1996. In 2019, the penalty was 19.2%, reflecting a 2.8 percentage-point improvement compared with a penalty of 22.0% a year earlier.

• The teacher wage penalty declined in the wake of recent teacher strikes but only time and more data will reveal whether teachers’ actions led to a decline and a turning point. The lessening of the teaching penalty from 22.0% in 2018 to 19.2% in 2019 may reflect pay raises enacted in the wake of widespread strikes and other actions by teachers in 2018 and 2019, particularly in some of the states where teacher pay lagged the most. Unfortunately, the data we have to date are not sufficient to allow us to identify the geographic locus of the improvements in teacher wages and benefits and any association with the recent wave of teacher protests and strikes. Only time will tell if this single data point marks a turning point in teacher pay...

• The benefits advantage of teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty. The teacher total compensation penalty was 10.2% in 2019 (composed of a 19.2% wage penalty offset by a 9.0% benefits advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 7.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2019.

Isn't it time that we started to prepare for the future?

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2020 Medley #23

Everything has changed,

It's not that simple,

Teachers are still disrespected,

Do we need charter schools?

TEACHERS, EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED

Everything about teaching has changed.

We were already in the midst of a teacher shortage before the pandemic began. Now, when things are harder than ever for teachers, we're going to lose more if we don't take care of the teachers we have.

The current pandemic has an impact on everything we do. It impacts shopping, medical appointments, and school attendance. It affects children and their teachers...and, by extension, everyone who lives with, or interacts with, a child or a teacher. That might include infants and grandparents. It includes people with high-risk conditions like obesity, kidney disease, COPD, heart conditions, diabetes, and sickle cell disease. Just because a child doesn't have a high-risk condition doesn't mean they couldn't transmit COVID-19 to someone in their family with a high-risk condition. Just because a teacher doesn't have a high-risk condition doesn't mean that they couldn't transmit COVID-19 to someone in their family with a high-risk condition.

Everything about teaching has changed...from attendance (face to face, virtual, or both), to eating a meal with students, to loss of planning and instructional time due to more time spent on keeping students and teachers safe. Teachers can no longer sit close to a student to help them read a passage, or hold a pencil, or search for a topic online or in a book. Teachers can no longer talk to a student privately if they're in a Zoom classroom, or if social distance has to be maintained. No more pats on the back, high fives, or fist bumps.

Everything about teaching has changed and teachers are expected to change everything they do with little or no help, with little or no additional resources, and with students who are traumatized beyond what they might have been before, by forced isolation, loss of loved ones to COVID-19, or lack of home stability.

The video of the teacher’s comments echoes and describes the feelings of teachers nearly everywhere. COVID is not just affecting kids, it’s affecting teachers, and we’re at risk of losing great people, some of the best and brightest, from the profession. https://t.co/gHXmQJvO97

— Chris Himsel (@himzchris) October 17, 2020

OPENING SCHOOLS DURING A PANDEMIC ISN'T SIMPLE

John Thompson Reviews “School’s Out” About Pandemic

Most readers will label this article tl;dr. Still, it's important if only to document how difficult it is to come to a consensus about opening schools during a pandemic.

Politicians will holler "Open the schools," but it's not so simple. Parents have to get back to work. Kids should have a chance to be around other kids. Teachers need to be face to face with kids to build relationships. Those things are all true, but there are conditions that must be met to keep everyone safe. The hollering politicians often ignore local coronavirus numbers, calls to provide PPE for staff and students, and additional funding that returning to school with various safeguards in place will cost.

Did you know, for example, that the speed with which schools opened during the pandemic had more to do with a community's voting record than with the safety of the students, students' families, and staff?

Simple solutions don't work for complex problems.

When I first read Alec MacGillis’ School’s Out, I worried that he reached conclusions that were too optimistic, but it made me hopeful. After all, it was a co-production by ProPublica and New Yorker, and MacGillis had listened to numerous top public health experts. Upon rereading, and following his links, I’ve reached a more discouraging appraisal. The published research he cites actually makes the case for more caution, and against MacGillis’ implicit call to reopen schools more quickly for in-person instruction...

The big problem, however, wasn’t teachers’ new fearfulness. The problem was the realities created by Trump, “governors and everybody else” who made it impossible to safely reopen many schools. For instance, a Brookings Institution study “found that districts’ school opening decisions correlated much more strongly with levels of support for Trump in the 2016 election than with local coronavirus case levels.” That reality was bad enough. But, School’s Out didn’t to seem fully consider how much schools in urban areas which voted against Trump are poorer and, often, politically powerless.

TEACHERS - STILL DISRESPECTED

How Are American Teachers Doing, Really?

Teachers are used to being ignored, underfunded, and generally treated with disrespect. The COVID-19 pandemic has not changed that.

What seems very wearing for a large number of teachers is the lack of support—doubly wearing because none of it is unexpected. We knew that pandemic schooling would be very expensive, but few additional resources have been forthcoming. We knew staffing would need to be expanded, but mostly it has not been. We knew that pandemic schooling would create whole new kinds of problems, but teachers have been left to solve those issues themselves. We knew that district leaders who had failed to build and maintain trust with their staffs would have extra trouble. We feared that too many teachers would be tossed into this storm and left to sort things out on their own, and in too many districts, that has come true. Disempowering teachers while offering a thin dose of toxic positivity doesn’t help. And through it all, far too many states and districts stick with the old top-down management model, failing to include teacher voices or insights in the crafting of policies, and in some cases deliberately silencing teachers who try to ask, “But what about—?” None of this is a surprise to classroom teachers, but it’s still discouraging.

Across the nation, a thousand odd contingencies have emerged, none of them planned for. Who’s responsible for reporting a child’s exposure, and how many degrees of exposure call for isolation? Parents have been more than willing to send symptomatic students to school. There are districts that forbid teachers to get a Covid test, because a test means automatic two-day isolation. Florida’s governor has forbidden the reporting of school Covid stats, and some schools have defied his order. In other districts, teachers are scolded for posting data from their school. In other districts, teachers are scolded if they try to provide more substantial classroom barriers. And some districts are delivering ultimatums to teachers—show up and risk exposure, take unpaid leave, or lose your job.

WE DON'T NEED CHARTER SCHOOLS

The Foundational Fallacy Of Charter Schools

Peter Greene brings up an important argument against charter schools. They're not needed.

If you have a public school with room for 1000 students, serving 800, what's going to happen when a charter school opens down the block. Will there be enough students for both schools? Will the community save money? The answer to both questions is no.

Fix public schools that need to be fixed. Fund underfunded communities and schools. Stop expensive and needless privatization.

Before we talk about the quality of education or the importance of [free ed], when it comes to charter schools, there's a much more fundamental fallacy that we must address first, a fallacy that addresses a premise of virtually every charter program launched in this country.

You cannot run multiple school districts for the same amount of money you used to spend to operate just one.

This really should not come as a surprise to anyone. When was the last time you heard of a business of any sort saying, "The money is getting tight, and we need to tighten our belts. So let's open up some new facilities."

UPDATE: What it's like teaching during a pandemic: Article and video.

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Improve Reading Achievement. Teach More Social Studies

OUR STUDENTS/SCHOOLS AREN'T FAILING

Using the "failing schools" trope has long been a tactic of school "reformers" to claim that privatizing education is necessary. It was called out again in an article in Hechinger Report where we were told that...

Only a third of American students are reading proficiently at grade level, according to national benchmark tests.

(The article continues by suggesting that the failure to teach phonics is the reason for the poor test scores, but that's a discussion for another time.)

This description of the apparent desperate condition of the nation's readers comes from the NAEP test, the Nation's Report Card. Diane Ravitch, a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, has frequently reminded her readers that "proficient" on the NAEP is equivalent to "a very high level of academic achievement," like a grade of A, and that a score of "basic" is not terrible.

When I served on NAGB for seven years, the board understood very well that proficient was a high bar, not a pass-fail mark. No member of the board or the staff expected that some day all students would attain “NAEP Proficient.” Yet critics and newspaper consistently use NAEP proficient as an indicator that “all students” should one day reach. This misperception has been magnified by the No Child Left Behind Act, which declared in law that all students should be “proficient” by the year 2014.

...and here, from her 2013 book, Reign of Error...

'Basic," as defined by the NAGB, is "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade." In my view, the student who scores "basic" is probably a B or C student.

She also stated that the NAEP test does not represent a grade level test.

NAEP does not report grade levels (grade level describes a midpoint on the grading scale where half are aboce and half are below).

Of course we'd like all students in the US to read at an A level, but that's not a reasonable expectation, any more than it's reasonable to expect all major league baseball hitters to bat .300 each year, all NBA basketball players to have a 95% free throw average, or all professional quarterbacks to have a 70% average pass completion percentage.

The truth is that two-thirds to three-fourths of American students were reading at or above basic in 2019. That's not perfect, but it's much better than the implication that two-thirds of American children are failing to learn to read!

A WAY TO IMPROVE READING SCORES

The Hechinger Report described research that reported that more prior knowledge, specifically, more knowledge of history, geography, and civics, can increase reading achievement.

As proof, the authors referred us to a September 2020 quantitative analysis done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute which suggests that...

...a focus on academic content—not generalized reading skills and strategies—will equip students with the background knowledge they need to comprehend all sorts of texts and make them truly literate.

The analysis found that...

• Elementary school students in the U.S. spend much more time on ELA than on any other subject.
• Increased instructional time in social studies—but not in ELA—is associated with improved reading ability.
• The students who benefit the most from additional social studies time are girls and those from lower-income and/or non-English-speaking homes.

Interruption...
I'm overjoyed that the Fordham Institute, known for its "edu-reformist" and phonics-first tendencies, is promoting the development of students' knowledge base as a way to improve reading (specifically reading comprehension), but I learned about activating prior knowledge as a way to increase reading achievement when I was a student in 1974-1975.
I also learned about activating prior knowledge (aka schema) during my Reading Recovery training and experience beginning in the mid 1990s, and I learned the power of background knowledge during my Reading Recovery Teacher years as a teacher of Amish students. I found that I had to teach additional vocabulary to some of my Amish first graders who were unfamiliar with language associated with cities and the wider world. One student in particular, didn't know what the words "street" or "avenue" meant. He was familiar with words like "road," "lane," and "highway," but he had never heard words associated with cities. Part of this was his age, of course; Reading Recovery targets struggling students who are only six years old and in first grade. As he grew he might have gained wider experience, but in first grade, and coming from a bi-lingual, and exclusively rural culture, he didn't have a clue what those words were.
It's nice that the Fordham Institute is catching up with what experienced educators have known for years.
And now we resume your regularly scheduled blog post

The Hechinger Report article indicated that only social studies instruction had a significant instructional impact on students' reading achievement.

According to the researchers’ calculations, only social studies — among all the subjects — made a positive impact on reading over the long term. Indeed, for every half hour of additional social studies instruction a child received per day, his or her fifth grade reading scores were 0.15 of a standard deviation higher, on average. Standard deviations are statistical units that are hard to translate but this represents a relatively small increase in test scores. Certainly, social studies isn’t a silver bullet to fix reading but the result here suggests that it might help.

The researchers controlled for students’ socio-economic status, race, home language and many other other student and school characteristics. The boost to reading scores from taking more hours of social studies was true even among students of the same race and family income and who started with the same reading scores in kindergarten. The researchers also checked to see if teachers were giving stronger readers more social studies instruction because they didn’t need as much help with reading but they didn’t find any evidence of that.

Counterintuitively, more minutes of reading instruction were not associated with higher reading scores.

One thing to keep in mind is that all this discussion of student reading achievement is based on standardized test scores.

It's also (or perhaps more) important to help students experience the joy and wonder of reading as well as teaching them the mechanics of decoding. The best way to do this? Read aloud every day to your children and students, and give them the opportunity and time to read for fun.

See also:
Prior Knowledge Improves Reading Comprehension
How Does Students’ Prior Knowledge Affect Their Learning?

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2020 Medley #8: Public Education, Disaster Capitalism, and COVID-19

UPDATE: A version of this blog entry appears in the Friday, March 20 edition of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, titled: Coping in the time of COVID

DISASTER

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, described how natural and man-made disasters open the door to privatization. During the COVID-19 disaster, we must ensure that the same thing doesn't happen to public education.

Schools have been starved over the last few decades. The lack of funding for public education, and other public institutions and public infrastructure, have opened up schools to vulnerability under the Shock Doctrine. Klein wrote...

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.

and...

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.

COVID-19

As of this writing, schools are closed for more than half of America's children. But, as we've discussed in these blogs over the last fourteen years, public schools, and public school teachers, are about more than academics.

Teachers care about their students. Friends of Betsy DeVos may think that we're only in it for the money, but public school teachers care about the whole child...and as Nancy Flanagan writes below, teachers are First Responders when it comes to taking care of the nation's children.

The following articles describe what public school teachers and public schools are doing to help children and their parents thrive during this stressful time. I recommend that you read all of them in their entirety...

ED-TECH

HEWN (Hack Education Weekly Newsletter), No. 344

Ed-tech is ready to dump their items on schools (for a price, of course)...especially now when those schools that have closed are using technology to connect with their students. Remember that computers, phones, iPads, and similar digital devices are tools, not ends in themselves.

...an assertion that rests on the assumption that ed-tech is good, that it can replicate at home what happens in the classroom. “This may be our moment,” ed-tech folks exclaim, giddily sharing lists of their favorite digital learning tools (with little concern, it seems for questions of accessibility, privacy, or security) and tips for quickly moving “to the cloud.” Of course, education technology — as a field, an industry, a discipline, a solution, what have you — has had decades and decades and decades to get this right. It still hasn’t. So when you hear “this is our moment,” you should recall perhaps the thesis of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. What we’re poised to see in response to the coronavirus — and not just in education, to be fair — is more disaster capitalism, and “disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between creation and destruction, between hurting and healing.”

TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS STEP UP

Coronavirus Has Shown Us the Vital Role Schools Play, But Will America Listen?

Schools feed and house (and sometimes clothe) students every day. Those students who have little or no home resources will suffer most from the lack of open school buildings.

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare something that educators have always known. Schools, side by side with hospitals, are the most important institutions in our country’s social safety net. Of course, we’ve said this since the era of school shootings, where teachers have placed their bodies (literally) in front of students to keep them safe.

But the coronavirus pandemic has put this into even sharper focus, as we grapple with the domino effects of closing entire school districts for prolonged periods at a time. Some public schools will be closed anywhere from a day to a month. Yet, others, such as the New York City system, are still, at this writing, open.

Thus far, dealing with the coronavirus has highlighted four important things about our nation’s schools:

Schools are key to keeping the economy running...
Schools provide respite housing for homeless students during daytime hours...
Schools help to prevent large-scale child hunger every day...
Schools are the primary source of public health information for many families.

Once Again Teachers are First Responders

Schools and teachers have stepped up to help their students.

...Teachers are like those firefighters in Kirkland, Washington who came to transport extremely ill nursing home residents to the hospital, without gloves and masks. Just doing our jobs, just following directions.

Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who organized take-home packets and figured out how to get coursework online, even if they didn’t have a clue about how to do it before last week. And thank you to those who pointed out, with considerable asperity, how incredibly inequitable virtual instruction will be, but went ahead and made plans to do it anyway. Thanks to all who sent home food or arranged for food pickup—or even made a single call to a single household, to make sure an adult was home.

Nobody knows how to do this well. Nobody. But schools and teachers are still trying.

Disaster Capitalism, Online Instruction, and What Covid-19 Is Teaching Us About Public Schools and Teachers

Nancy Bailey's blog entry was the catalyst for this post.

We’re reminded of disaster capitalism, a concept highlighted by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, how Katrina was used in New Orleans to convert traditional public schools to charter schools. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. (p. 5-6). Who thought that could happen?

The transitioning of technology into public schools, not simply as a supplemental tool for teachers to use at their discretion, but as a transformative means to remove teachers from the equation, has been highlighted with groups like Digital Promise and KnowledgeWorks. Both promote online learning and it’s difficult to find teachers in the mix.

Combining this with the intentional defunding of public schools, shoddy treatment of teachers including the unwillingness to pay them appropriate salaries, inadequate resources and support staff, crumbling buildings, and the destruction of public schooling in America, should we not question what placing students online at this strange time will mean in the future to our schools?

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2020 Medley #6: Public Schools Week

Public schools for the public good,
The failure of "choice",
Where will we find teachers for tomorrow?

PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD

Public Schools Week ends today, though for ninety percent of American schoolchildren the celebration of public education takes place every day during their local school year.

Why do the vast majority of our K-12 students choose public schools? Because public schools don't choose their students. Every child has a place in public schools. No child is turned away. All children are welcome: children with different gender preferences, children of any color, any or no religious affiliation, rich, poor, athletically or academically gifted, or physically or academically challenged.

We support public schools because it's important for us to have a society in which everyone is educated. Educated citizens make informed citizens. Informed citizens make informed choices. Informed choices make for a better society. Jefferson wrote (perhaps naively)...

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

John Adams envisioned a public school system that provided for publicly supported schools across the nation.

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.

Public Schools Serve The Public Good

The public good is a concept that has always had to fight for survival against human selfishness and it's no different in today's world. Tribalism has replaced a shared public responsibility. We have become a nation in conflict, not cooperation.

Vouchers were born out of a desire to avoid integrating schools. When so-called "separate but equal" schools became unconstitutional in the United States proponents of segregation chose to close public schools and set up private schools using voucher programs. Today's voucher programs benefit mostly religious schools that have the option to choose their students. Only certain students are allowed.

During Public Schools Week, we must recommit ourselves to defend the educational system that serves 90 percent of America’s children: our public schools. One way to do that is by opposing private school voucher schemes.

Reasons to oppose vouchers abound: The plans violate church-state separation and individual conscience because they force taxpayers to pay for private religious education. Voucher schools don’t improve academic performance. Many private schools engage in discriminatory hiring and admissions policies. Vouchers don’t require schools to be accountable to the public.

But there’s another equally compelling reason to oppose vouchers that often gets overlooked: Voucher plans subsidize private schools that serve a private interest, not the public good.

Five Threats To America’s Public School System

Those who feed the forces of tribalism distrust the concept of the public good. Since privatizers are in power, they are a very real threat to public schools.

President Donald Trump...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos...

Private school lobbying groups...

Anti-government extremists: The simplistic idea that anything the government does is bad has a powerful hold on conservative thought in America. Because public schools are a very common manifestation of a public, government-provided service, they’re a high-profile target for ideologues who favor privatization of as many public services as possible...Never mind that public schools educate the vast majority of American schoolchildren and serve the public good.

Millionaires looking to make a profit: In her new book Slaying Goliath, education writer Diane Ravitch focuses on a band of millionaires (in some cases billionaires) who have decided to make education “reform” a priority. The problem, Ravitch writes, is that these would-be reformers don’t have backgrounds in education and naïvely insist that “market solutions” from the business community can be applied to a public service like education...

National Poll Shows Strong Voter Support for Public Schools

Americans support their public schools and are willing to pay for them, while most are unwilling to pay for private schools. That's why voucher plans usually fail when put to a popular vote. States rely on legislators to fund voucher programs. [emphasis in original]

We surveyed likely voters. Here’s what they said:

Funding for Public Schools

• 64% think funding for public schools should be increased

• 26% think funding should be kept the same, and only 6% thinking funding should be decreased

• Of those who believe funding should be increased, eight out of ten would support an increase in funding even if it meant they would pay more in taxes.

Public Funds for Private Schools

• 73% agree with the statement we should NOT take away public funds from our public schools to fund private, religious, and home school education

• 64% of voters are...less likely to vote for an elected official who supports taking away funds from public schools to give to private schools, including 47% who would be much less likely to do so

Schools And Other Shared Public Spaces

Curmudgucation's Peter Greene is a fan of public education, the public good, and shared public spaces...

I remain a fan of public education in no small part because it is one of the last shared public places left, even as it is being whittled away. It is a space that reflects the big unruly mess that is a democratic-ish country, and yes that means conflicts and negotiations and an unending clash of conflicting values and goals. But the proposed alternative--these people want something different so they'll just go over there by themselves--requires a continued breaking of relationships, a repeated running away from conflict in place of resolutions. In fact, a worsening of conflict, because once separated into private slices, everyone can just create cartoon strawman versions of Those People Over There to revile and deride.

I've been reading about the ideal for years--if you want to send your kid to a private school for left-handed druids who don't believe in evolution but do believe in global warming, and who want to play in a marching band, well, then, you should be able to make that choice. Everyone should have their own choice of a hundred separate different school systems. But we already know how well "separate but equal" works out. And by demanding that such a ecosystem of parallel schools be organized by free market forces, we guarantee failure, because the free market is great for picking winners and losers, terrible for creating equity among disparate groups.

THE FAILURE OF "CHOICE"

National School Choice Week is actually about promoting certain choices over others

Those who are privatizing our public education systems are creating a system of winners and losers.

Surely some well-meaning parents and students celebrated. But they were joined by powerful people who, despite what they say, don’t believe that every child deserves a great school. Instead, these people believe in a certain kind of choice over all others. In their worldview, market choice is more important than democracy, parents are consumers rather than members of a broader community, and education is a competition between students, with winners and losers.

School choice costing taxpayers

I'd be remiss if I didn't include information about the charter school scandal now swirling in Indiana...where virtual charter school operators paid themselves and their own businesses $85 million. The money came from state tuition support and included funds for students who were never enrolled in the so-called schools.

The legislature blames the Department of Education, despite the fact that the privatization laws passed in the Indiana General Assembly were lax enough to allow such cheating and conflicts of interest to happen.

This is not unique to Indiana. Privatizers around the nation regularly steal tax money from public schools. The Network for Public Education has been tracking charter school scandals. The current list includes more than two dozen scandals from across the nation in January 2020 alone.

For further reading: Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and Waste

Blaming the Department of Education for the abuses of charter school operators is like blaming the BMV for the actions of a drunk driver. Responsibility for lax regulations and oversight for both charter schools and voucher schools falls squarely on Bosma and the GOP supermajority. In cozying up to the deep-pocketed school-choice community, they ignored glaring examples of corruption here and elsewhere. It was almost 11 years ago when The Journal Gazette first reported on the suspicious real estate deals surrounding two Imagine Inc. charter schools in Fort Wayne – schools that eventually shut down with $3.6 million in outstanding state loans.

Charter school scandals are so common that the Network for Public Education began collecting them on a website and tagging them on Twitter: #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal.

WHO WILL BE TOMORROW'S TEACHERS?

The Number Of People Who Want To Teach Has Dropped By More Than Half This Decade

Public schools are being starved by privatizers diverting tax money to charters and vouchers. Teaching in underfunded schools isn't easy, so it's no wonder that young people are turning their backs on careers in education.

Federal data shows during the 2008-09 school year, 18,113 people were enrolled in teacher preparation programs in [Indiana]. But in 2016, that number was cut by more than half; the programs training future teachers saw only 7,127 people enrolled.

What message are we sending to the future?

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